BSD & Darwin Archive

McKusick Tells of the BSD Days As Only He Can

BSD & Darwin 4 Comments
"The drought of those who speak without depending on slides has ended at the 12th Australian national Linux conference. Last evening, Marshall Kirk McKusick, a well-known BSD hacker, took those assembled down a slightly different track - after all, this is a Linux conference - with his narrative history of BSD. And what a rollicking ride it was! And the venue for his talk could hold only 100 people. He based his talk on notes he had made while travelling through Australia on a train in 1986 - he was a keynote speaker at the now-defunct Australian UNIX and Open Systems User Group conference in 1986."
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VirtualBSD 8.1 Released

BSD & Darwin 18 Comments
It's been a long time coming, but a brand new release of VirtualBSD is out: "VirtualBSD 8.1 is a desktop ready FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE based on the Xfce 4.6 Desktop Environment and, being distributed as VMware appliance, it makes dead easy to take FreeBSD for a test drive." The best part? Not only are the most common aplications available out of the box, this is a genuine FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, which means that if you go past the desktop you'll be dealing with The Real Thing. You can take a look at the screenshots, go to the download page or, if you're impatient, just grab the torrent file.
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DragonFly BSD 2.8.2 Released

BSD & Darwin 13 Comments
The 2.8.2 release of DragonFly BSD is now available, featuring significant advances in multi-processor performance based on DragonFly's signature soft token locks. It also includes many feature advancements including: pf from OpenBSD 4.2, the Wifi stack from FreeBSD and DataMapper from NetBSD (with significant enhancements). This release also marks the return of the GUI image. See the release notes for full details.
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Security in Your Pocket: OpenBSD on ARM

  Submitted by lucas_maximus BSD & Darwin 1 Comment
InformIT has an interview with Dale Rahn, the OpenBSD ARM port maintainer, about the history of OpenBSD on mobile devices, and where some opportunities growing in the mobile space in the future. It covers the DARPA-funded origins of OpenBSD use in mobile (mostly about firms not wanting to use GPL code), and initial enthusiasm for the Zaurus among BSD guys. Rahn touts advantages that OpenBSD has over the more-popular mobile Linux distros, and some shortcomings that still need to be addressed.
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DragonFlyBSD 2.4 Released

  Submitted by ebasconp BSD & Darwin 15 Comments
The DragonFly 2.4 release was released just today. One can choose from a bare-bones CD ISO, a DVD ISO that includes an X environment, and a bare-bones bootable USB drive image. In addition, this is the first time DragonFlyBSD has had a 64-bit ISO. 64-bit support is stable, but there will only be limited pkgsrc support in the current release. All versions of the release can all be downloaded from one of the many mirrors.
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DesktopBSD Development Comes to a Halt

  Submitted by chuck BSD & Darwin 10 Comments
It seems like the DesktopBSD project's future is at stake due to a lack developers and time. "Hello everyone, sorry for not keeping in touch with you guys for quite a while," main developer Peter Hofer writes, "Truth is, I find myself having less and less time for DesktopBSD these days. In addition, my interests have shifted quite a bit since I started working on it in 2004 (thinking of it, that's almost 5 years ago now...). As a result, I don't really feel that I can make DesktopBSD progress steadily and significantly on my own. Unfortunately, there are no other active developers nor does it seem like there are any who would be interested in contributing." While the project is not dead yet, there will be no major changes or bugfixes for the upcoming 1.7 release, and it could very well be the project's last release.
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PureDarwin Xmas Developer Preview Released

  Submitted by probono BSD & Darwin 44 Comments
Most of you will know that the underlying core set of components of Mac OS X and the iPhone operating system are released under the Apple Public Source License, an FSF-approved open source license. Few of you, however, will have actually used Darwin in any other form than Mac OS X or the iPhone OS. Despite numerous projects attempting so, Darwin has never gained any significant traction apart from Apple's own interest. The PureDarwin project tries to rise from the ashes of the OpenDarwin project, and has just released a Christmas developer preview.
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What Is Darwin?

BSD & Darwin 62 Comments
"I am very happy about the direction in which the Mac OS X GUI is going, although sadly many Mac users aren’t interested in (or don’t know about) the “lower levels” of the Macintosh Operating System. Have you ever wondered why the Terminal greets you with the words “Welcome to Darwin”? Why do BSD and Mac OS share certain bits of code? Why does Wikipedia describe Mac OS X as a graphical operating system? Today we’re going to take a look at the underlying open source technology which powers your fancy Leopard OS - the hidden core set of components, named Darwin."
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MirOS BSD 10 Released

BSD & Darwin 16 Comments
The MirOS BSD project has released MirOS BSD xi. "The MirOS Project proudly presents release 10 of MirOS BSD: MirOS xi. A mini-ISO for the installation can be downloaded from mirbsd.org. This image can be burned to a CD and used for installing over the network. The full CD image can be downloaded via BitTorrent. MirOS BSD is a secure operating system, originally based on OpenBSD, for i386 and sparc machines. Read more about it at the 'About MirOS' page.
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DragonFlyBSD 1.12 Released

  Submitted by vermaden BSD & Darwin 9 Comments
DragonFlyBSD 1.12 has been released. "This release is primarily a maintainance update. A lot of work has been done all over the kernel and userland. There are no new big-ticket items though we have pushed the MP lock further into the kernel. The 2.0 release is scheduled for mid-year. Of the current big-ticket item work, the new HAMMER filesystem is almost to the alpha stage of development and is expected to be production ready by the mid-year 2.0 release."
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